Marta Leslie

Music has always been a big part of Marta’s life through her family, and her upbringing, with her mother being a music teacher, and her uncles being are music producers. They inspired her passion for music at a young age, and also, inspired her to started playing piano at only 8 years old and has been playing ever since. Marta is now a student at university studying Music where she is working towards becoming a music producer.

During the interview, I asked, ‘Have you ever felt discriminated against whilst working in the Music industry?’. Although she said she hasn’t directly experienced any inequality, she said that she can see the clear distinction in the divide between women in music compared the men. When she was 15 years old, she loved EDM music and wanted to be a DJ, however, whilst wanting this dream to happen for her at the time there were only 1 in 15 top DJs who were Females, which sadly put a stop to this dream.

During her 2 years studying at university, she has realised that women are picked up on how they look or how their bodies look like rather than their talent. Marts said that she feels she will need to work twice as hard to be recognised as a producer because it is a male-dominated industry.

When she went into first year she had to do a live performance module, where they all had to work collaboratively and as the class was mostly male, Marta said that it was daunting, as a shy person and felt that she couldn't express her options as much as she wanted to. and felt that any opinions that she did put across people weren't interested.

During this class, she had a bad experience with one of the Lectures where he started ‘Mansplaining’ how to play basic chords to her even though she has been playing piano now for 10 plus years.